On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 18:01 -0500, Jonathan Bryant wrote:

> I've been fighting my professors to let me use OCaml for over a year now
> and this professor is, at least, the first one who's halfway letting me
> use it.  Unfortunately, he is not completely convinced.  Being a OO &
> ASP/.NET junkie and never having seriously used a functional language,
> he is lost as to HOFs, functors, partial application, etc. and isn't
> really convinced that they are useful/necessary (I also believe he
> hasn't more than glanced at the code). 

Sounds like you should be the professor, and he the student :)

>  He is also demanding UML
> diagrams of my code with these notated in it.

> If not, how are these things
> usually notated in academic settings 

Category theory. It's full of pictures :)
But doesn't fit well with applicative languages
(CT is compositional).

Hmm..


	'a list ----- filter ----> 'a list

you can draw some pictures of functions and join
up the domains and codomains, and, instantiate
type variables:

	'a list
	   ||
	   ||
	   V
	int list

I guess you'll eventually get enough ink on paper to make
it look pretty. 


-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net